Part 12

It can be shown that the differences between that ship and the one I am writing these historical contributions in, are in several respects remarkable. Take the matter of decoration, for instance. I have been looking around again, yesterday and to-day, and have noted several details which I conceive to have been absent from Columbus’s ship, or at least slurred over and not elaborated and perfected. I observe state-room doors three inches thick, of solid oak, and polished. I note companionway vestibules with walls, doors, and ceilings panelled in polished hard-woods, some light, some dark, all dainty and delicate joiner-work, and yet every joint compact and tight; with beautiful pictures inserted, composed of blue tiles—some of the pictures containing as many as sixty tiles—and the joinings of those tiles perfect. These are daring experiments. One would have said that the first time the ship went straining and labouring through a storm-tumbled sea those tiles would gape apart and drop out. That they have not done so is evidence that the joiner’s art has advanced a good deal since the days when ships were so shackly that when a giant sea gave them a wrench the doors came unbolted. I find the walls of the dining-saloon upholstered with mellow pictures wrought in tapestry, and the ceiling aglow with pictures done in oil. In other places of assembly I find great panels filled with embossed Spanish leather, the figures rich with gilding and bronze. Everywhere I find sumptuous masses of colour—colour, colour, colour—colour all about, colour of every shade and tint and variety; and as a result, the ship is bright and cheery to the eye, and this cheeriness invades one’s spirit and contents it. To fully appreciate the force and spiritual value of this radiant and opulent dream of colour, one must stand outside at night in the pitch dark and the rain, and look in through a port, and observe it in the lavish splendour of the electric lights. The old-time ships were dull, plain, graceless, gloomy, and horribly depressing. They compelled the blues; one could not escape the blues in them. The modern idea is right: to surround the passenger with conveniences, luxuries, and abundance of inspiriting colour. As a result, the ship is the pleasantest place one can be in, except, perhaps, one’s home.

A VANISHED SENTIMENT

One thing is gone, to return no more for ever—the romance of the sea. Soft sentimentality about the sea has retired from the activities of this life, and is but a memory of the past, already remote and much faded. But within the recollection of men still living, it was in the breast of every individual; and the further any individual lived from salt water the more of it he kept in stock. It was as pervasive, as universal, as the atmosphere itself. The mere mention of the sea, the romantic sea, would make any company of people sentimental and mawkish at once. The great majority of the songs that were sung by the young people of the back settlements had the melancholy wanderer for subject, and his mouthings about the sea for refrain. Picnic parties, paddling down a creek in a canoe when the twilight shadows were gathering, always sang

Homeward bound, homeward bound From a foreign shore;

and this was also a favourite in the West with the passengers on sternwheel steamboats. There was another—

My boat is by the shore, And my bark is on the sea, But before I go, Tom Moore, Here’s a double health to thee.

And this one, also—

Oh, pilot, ’tis a fearful night, There’s danger on the deep.

And this—

A life on the ocean wave, And a home on the rolling deep, Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep!

And this—

A wet sheet and a flowing sea, And a wind that follows fair.

And this—

My foot is on my gallant deck, Once more the rover is free!

And the ‘Larboard Watch’—the person referred to below is at the masthead, or somewhere up there—

Oh, who can tell what joy he feels, As o’er the foam his vessel reels, And his tired eyelids slumb’ring fall, He rouses at the welcome call Of ‘Larboard watch—ahoy!’

Yes, and there was for ever and always some jackass-voiced person braying out—

Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep!

Other favourites had these suggestive titles: ‘The Storm at Sea;’ ‘The Bird at Sea;’ ‘The Sailor Boy’s Dream;’ ‘The Captive Pirate’s Lament;’ ‘We are far from Home on the Stormy Main’—and so on, and so on, the list is endless. Everybody on a farm lived chiefly amid the dangers of the deep in those days, in fancy.

But all that is gone now. Not a vestige of it is left. The iron-clad, with her unsentimental aspect and frigid attention to business, banished romance from the war-marine, and the unsentimental steamer has banished it from the commercial marine. The dangers and uncertainties which made sea life romantic have disappeared and carried the poetic element along with them. In our day the passengers never sing sea-songs on board a ship, and the band never plays them. Pathetic songs about the wanderer in strange lands far from home, once so popular and contributing such fire and colour to the imagination by reason of the rarity of that kind of wanderer, have lost their charm and fallen silent, because everybody is a wanderer in the far lands now, and the interest in that detail is dead. Nobody is worried about the wanderer; there are no perils of the sea for him, there are no uncertainties. He is safer in the ship than he would probably be at home, for there he is always liable to have to attend some friend’s funeral, and stand over the grave in the sleet, bareheaded—and that means pneumonia for him, if he gets his deserts; and the uncertainties of his voyage are reduced to whether he will arrive on the other side in the appointed afternoon, or have to wait till morning.

The first ship I was ever in was a sailing vessel. She was twenty-eight days going from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands. But the main reason for this particularly slow passage was, that she got becalmed, and lay in one spot fourteen days in the centre of the Pacific, two thousand miles from land. I hear no sea-songs in this present vessel, but I heard the entire layout in that one. There were a dozen young people—they are pretty old now I reckon—and they used to group themselves on the stern, in the starlight or the moonlight, every evening, and sing sea-songs till after midnight, in that hot, silent, motionless calm. They had no sense of humour, and they always sang ‘Homeward Bound,’ without reflecting that that was practically ridiculous, since they were standing still and not proceeding in any direction at all; and they often followed that song with ‘Are we almost there, are we almost there, said the dying girl as she drew near home?’

It was a very pleasant company of young people, and I wonder where they are now. Gone, oh, none knows whither; and the bloom and grace and beauty of their youth, where is that? Among them was a liar; all tried to reform him, but none could do it. And so, gradually, he was left to himself, none of us would associate with him. Many a time since I have seen in fancy that forsaken figure, leaning forlorn against the taffrail, and have reflected that perhaps if we had tried harder, and been more patient, we might have won him from his fault and persuaded him to relinquish it. But it is hard to tell; with him the vice was extreme, and was probably incurable. I like to think—and, indeed, I do think—that I did the best that in me lay to lead him to higher and better ways.

There was a singular circumstance. The ship lay becalmed that entire fortnight in exactly the same spot. Then a handsome breeze came fanning over the sea, and we spread our white wings for flight. But the vessel did not budge. The sails bellied out, the gale strained at the ropes, but the vessel moved not a hair’s breadth from her place. The captain was surprised. It was some hours before we found out what the cause of the detention was. It was barnacles. They collect very fast in that part of the Pacific. They had fastened themselves to the ship’s bottom; then others had fastened themselves to the first bunch, others to these, and so on, down and down and down, and the last bunch had glued the column hard and fast to the bottom of the sea, which is five miles deep at that point. So the ship was simply become the handle of a walking-cane five miles long—yes, and no more movable by wind and sail than a continent is. It was regarded by every one as remarkable.

Well, the next week—however, Sandy Hook is in sight.

_PLAYING COURIER_

A time would come when we must go from Aix-les-Bains to Geneva, and from thence, by a series of day-long and tangled journeys, to Bayreuth in Bavaria. I should have to have a courier, of course, to take care of so considerable a party as mine.

But I procrastinated. The time slipped along, and at last I woke up one day to the fact that we were ready to move and had no courier. I then resolved upon what I felt was a foolhardy thing, but I was in the humour of it. I said I would make the first stage without help—I did it.

I brought the party from Aix to Geneva by myself—four people. The distance was two hours and more, and there was one change of cars. There was not an accident of any kind, except leaving a valise and some other matters on the platform—a thing which can hardly be called an accident, it is so common. So I offered to conduct the party all the way to Bayreuth.

This was a blunder, though it did not seem so at the time. There was more detail than I thought there would be: 1. Two persons whom we had left in a Genevan pension some weeks before must be collected and brought to the hotel. 2. I must notify the people on the Grand Quay who store trunks to bring seven of our stored trunks to the hotel and carry back seven which they would find piled in the lobby. 3. I must find out what part of Europe Bayreuth was in and buy seven railway tickets for that point. 4. I must send a telegram to a friend in the Netherlands. 5. It was now two in the afternoon, and we must look sharp and be ready for the first night train, and make sure of sleeping-car tickets. 6. I must draw money at the bank.

It seemed to me that the sleeping-car tickets must be the most important thing, so I went to the station myself to make sure; hotel messengers are not always brisk people. It was a hot day and I ought to have driven, but it seemed better economy to walk. It did not turn out so, because I lost my way and trebled the distance. I applied for the tickets, and they asked me which route I wanted to go by, and that embarrassed me and made me lose my head, there were so many people standing around, and I not knowing anything about the routes, and not supposing there were going to be two; so I judged it best to go back and map out the road and come again.

I took a cab this time, but on my way upstairs at the hotel I remembered that I was out of cigars, so I thought it would be well to get some while the matter was in my mind. It was only round the corner and I didn’t need the cab. I asked the cabman to wait where he was. Thinking of the telegram and trying to word it in my head, I forgot the cigars and the cab, and walked on indefinitely. I was going to have the hotel people send the telegram, but as I could not be far from the Post Office by this time, I thought I would do it myself. But it was further than I had supposed. I found the place at last, and wrote the telegram and handed it in. The clerk was a severe-looking, fidgety man, and he began to fire French questions at me in such a liquid form that I could not detect the joints between his words, and this made me lose my head again. But an Englishman stepped up and said the clerk wanted to know where he was to send the telegram. I could not tell him, because it was not my telegram, and I explained that I was merely sending it for a member of my party. But nothing would pacify the clerk but the address; so I said that if he was so particular I would go back and get it.

However, I thought I would go and collect those lacking two persons first, for it would be best to do everything systematically and in order, and one detail at a time. Then I remembered the cab was eating up my substance down at the hotel yonder; so I called another cab, and told the man to go down and fetch it to the Post Office and wait till I came.

I had a long hot walk to collect those people, and when I got there they couldn’t come with me because they had heavy satchels, and must have a cab. I went away to find one, but before I ran across any I noticed that I had reached the neighbourhood of the Grand Quay—at least, I thought I had—so I judged I could save time by stepping around and arranging about the trunks. I stepped around about a mile, and although I did not find the Grand Quay, I found a cigar shop, and remembered about the cigars. I said I was going to Bayreuth, and wanted enough for the journey. The man asked me which route I was going to take. I said I did not know. He said he would recommend me to go by Zurich and various other places which he named, and offered to sell me seven second-class through tickets for $22 apiece, which would be throwing off the discount which the railroads allowed him. I was already tired of riding second class on first-class tickets, so I took him up.

By-and-by I found Natural & Co.’s storage office, and told them to send seven of our trunks to the hotel and pile them up in the lobby. It seemed to me that I was not delivering the whole of the message; still, it was all I could find in my head.

Next I found the bank, and asked for some money, but I had left my letter of credit somewhere and was not able to draw. I remembered now that I must have left it lying on the table where I wrote my telegram; so I got a cab and drove to the Post Office and went upstairs, and they said that a letter of credit had indeed been left on the table, but that it was now in the hands of the police authorities, and it would be necessary for me to go there and prove property. They sent a boy with me, and we went out the back way and walked a couple of miles and found the place; and then I remembered about my cabs, and asked the boy to send them to me when he got back to the Post Office. It was nightfall now, and the Mayor had gone to dinner. I thought I would go to dinner myself, but the officer on duty thought differently, and I stayed. The Mayor dropped in at half past ten, but said it was too late to do anything to-night—come at 9.30 in the morning. The officer wanted to keep me all night, and said I was a suspicious-looking person, and probably did not own the letter of credit, and didn’t know what a letter of credit was, but merely saw the real owner leave it lying on the table, and wanted to get it because I was probably a person that would want anything he could get, whether it was valuable or not. But the Mayor said he saw nothing suspicious about me, and that I seemed a harmless person, and nothing the matter with me but a wandering mind, and not much of that. So I thanked him and he set me free, and I went home in my three cabs.

As I was dog-tired, and in no condition to answer questions with discretion, I thought I would not disturb the Expedition at that time of night, as there was a vacant room I knew of at the other end of the hall; but I did not quite arrive there, as a watch had been set, the Expedition being anxious about me. I was placed in a galling situation. The Expedition sat stiff and forbidding, on four chairs in a row, with shawls and things all on, satchels and guide-books in lap. They had been sitting like that for four hours, and the glass going down all the time. Yes, and they were waiting—waiting for me. It seemed to me that nothing but a sudden, happily contrived, and brilliant _tour de force_ could break this iron front and make a diversion in my favour; so I shied my hat into the arena, and followed it with a skip and a jump, shouting blithely:

‘Ha, ha, here we all are, Mr. Merryman!’

Nothing could be deeper or stiller than the absence of applause which followed. But I kept on; there seemed no other way, though my confidence, poor enough before, had got a deadly check, and was in effect gone.

I tried to be jocund out of a heavy heart; I tried to touch the other hearts there and soften the bitter resentment in those faces by throwing off bright and airy fun, and making of the whole ghastly thing a joyously humorous incident; but this idea was not well conceived. It was not the right atmosphere for it. I got not one smile; not one line in those offended faces relaxed; I thawed nothing of the winter that looked out of those frosty eyes. I started one more breezy, poor effort, but the head of the Expedition cut into the centre of it, and said:

‘Where have you been?’

I saw by the manner of this that the idea was to get down to cold business now. So I began my travels, but was cut short again.

‘Where are the two others? We have been in frightful anxiety about them.’

‘Oh, they’re all right. I was to fetch a cab. I will go straight off, and——’

‘Sit down! Don’t you know it is 11 o’clock? Where did you leave them?’

‘At the pension.’

‘Why didn’t you bring them?’

‘Because we couldn’t carry the satchels. And so I thought——’

‘Thought! You should not try to think. One cannot think without the proper machinery. It is two miles to that pension. Did you go there without a cab?’

‘I—well, I didn’t intend to; it only happened so.’

‘How did it happen so?’

‘Because I was at the Post Office, and I remembered that I had left a cab waiting here, and so, to stop the expense, I sent another cab to—to——’

‘To what?’

‘Well, I don’t remember now, but I think the new cab was to have the hotel pay the old cab, and send it away.’

‘What good would that do?’

‘What good would it do? It would stop the expense, wouldn’t it?’

‘By putting the new cab in its place to continue the expense?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Why didn’t you have the new cab come back for you?’

‘Oh, that is what I did! I remember now. Yes, that is what I did. Because I recollect that when I——’

‘Well, then, why didn’t it come back for you?’

‘To the Post Office? Why, it did.’

‘Very well, then, how did you come to walk to the pension?’

‘I—I don’t quite remember how that happened. Oh, yes, I do remember now. I wrote the despatch to send to the Netherlands, and——’

‘Oh, thank goodness, you did accomplish something! I wouldn’t have had you fail to send——What makes you look like that? You are trying to avoid my eye. That despatch is the most important thing that——You haven’t sent that despatch!’

‘I haven’t said I didn’t send it.’

‘You don’t need to. Oh, dear, I wouldn’t have had that telegram fail for anything. Why didn’t you send it?’

‘Well, you see, with so many things to do and think of, I—they’re very particular there, and after I had written the telegram——’

‘Oh, never mind, let it go, explanations can’t help the matter now—what will he think of us?’

‘Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right! He’ll think we gave the telegram to the hotel people, and that they——’

‘Why, certainly! Why didn’t you do that? There was no other rational way.’

‘Yes, I know, but then I had it on my mind that I must be sure and get to the bank and draw some money——’

‘Well, you are entitled to some credit, after all, for thinking of that, and I don’t wish to be too hard on you, though you must acknowledge yourself that you have cost us all a good deal of trouble, and some of it not necessary. How much did you draw?’

‘Well, I—I had an idea that—that——’

‘That what?’

‘That—well, it seems to me that in the circumstances—so many of us, you know, and—and——’

‘What are you mooning about? Do turn your face this way and let me——Why, you haven’t drawn any money!’

‘Well, the banker said——’

‘Never mind what the banker said. You must have had a reason of your own. Not a reason, exactly, but something which——’

‘Well, then, the simple fact was that I hadn’t my letter of credit.’

‘Hadn’t your letter of credit?’

‘Hadn’t my letter of credit.’

‘Don’t repeat me like that. Where was it?’

‘At the Post Office.’

‘What was it doing there?’

‘Well, I forgot it, and left it there.’

‘Upon my word, I’ve seen a good many couriers, but of all the couriers that ever I——’

‘I’ve done the best I could.’

‘Well, so you have, poor thing, and I’m wrong to abuse you so when you’ve been working yourself to death while we’ve been sitting here, only thinking of our vexations instead of feeling grateful for what you were trying to do for us. It will all come out right. We can take the 7.30 train in the morning just as well. You’ve bought the tickets?’

‘I have—and it’s a bargain, too. Second class.’

‘I’m glad of it. Everybody else travels second class, and we might just as well save that ruinous extra charge. What did you pay?’

‘Twenty-two dollars apiece—through to Bayreuth.’

‘Why, I didn’t know you could buy through tickets anywhere but in London and Paris.’

‘Some people can’t, maybe; but some people can—of whom I am one of which, it appears.’

‘It seems a rather high price.’

‘On the contrary, the dealer knocked off his commission.’

‘Dealer?’

‘Yes—I bought them at a cigar shop.’

‘That reminds me. We shall have to get up pretty early, and so there should be no packing to do. Your umbrella, your rubbers, your cigars——What is the matter?’

‘Hang it! I’ve left the cigars at the bank.’

‘Just think of it! Well, your umbrella?’

‘I’ll have that all right. There’s no hurry.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Oh, that’s all right; I’ll take care of——’

‘Where is that umbrella?’

‘It’s just the merest step—it won’t take me——’

‘Where is it?’

‘Well, I think I left it at the cigar shop; but any way——’

‘Take your feet out from under that thing. It’s just as I expected! Where are your rubbers?’

‘They—well——’

‘Where are your rubbers?’

‘It’s got so dry now—well, everybody says there’s not going to be another drop of——’

‘Where—are—your—rubbers?’

‘Well, you see—well, it was this way. First, the officer said——’

‘What officer?’

‘Police officer; but the Mayor, he——’

‘What Mayor?’

‘Mayor of Geneva; but I said——’

‘Wait. What is the matter with you?’

‘Who, me? Nothing. They both tried to persuade me to stay, and——’

‘Stay where?’

‘Well—the fact is——’

‘Where have you been? What’s kept you out till half past ten at night?’

‘Oh, you see, after I lost my letter of credit, I——’

‘You are beating around the bush a good deal. Now, answer the question in just one straightforward word. Where are those rubbers?’

‘They—well, they’re in the county jail.’

I started a placating smile, but it petrified. The climate was unsuitable. Spending three or four hours in jail did not seem to the Expedition humorous. Neither did it to me, at bottom.

I had to explain the whole thing, and of course it came out then that we couldn’t take the early train, because that would leave my letter of credit in hock still. It did look as if we had all got to go to bed estranged and unhappy, but by good luck that was prevented. There happened to be mention of the trunks, and I was able to say I had attended to that feature.

‘There, you are just as good and thoughtful and painstaking and intelligent as you can be, and it’s a shame to find so much fault with you, and there shan’t be another word of it! You’ve done beautifully, admirably, and I’m sorry I ever said one ungrateful word to you.’